Everyone, OP is trying to delete from inside a ftp client, not the Unix command shell. I tagged the question with osx and ftp and edited the question header, but the edit has to be approved first before it shows.
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LevonJun 19 '12 at 2:41

I'm on a Mac using terminal to ftp. I tried 1 & 2. There are no hidden files. When I try 2, I still get "usage: rmdir directory-name"
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user19993Jun 19 '12 at 1:38

@user19993 re "on a Mac using terminal to ftp" .. is this osx, and just to be sure, you are trying to delete the directory not via ftp, but on your Mac in one of your directories, right?
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LevonJun 19 '12 at 1:42

I am on a mac OSX. I have connected to my ftp via terminal - in an attempt to delete this directory because I cant seem to do it via FTP programs or web interface.
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user19993Jun 19 '12 at 1:43

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@user19993 Ok, thanks that's helpful, I added a OSX tag to your question. I am still a bit unclear about how/where you are trying to delete the file. What is your prompt, is it a regular terminal prompt or something like ftp>?
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LevonJun 19 '12 at 1:46

I am connected to my Dreamhost ftp account via terminal for Mac. I have a directory in this account that used to hold a wordpress install. I deleted the files within, but the wp-content folder is still there with a symbolic link inside. I want to remove this entire directory, but I cant. I assume the best (most powerful) way to do this was via command line. However, I cant seem to get the force remove commands to work. I hope this helps - again I'm pretty new to this so sorry if I'm missing something here. And yes the prompt is ftp>
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user19993Jun 19 '12 at 1:52

Tim, I am using Mac OSX terminal to connect to ftp to my Dreamhost server. The find command is not available. Again, I plead ignorance on the subject matter.
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user19993Jun 19 '12 at 2:35

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ah, you may want to try a graphical ftp client like Transmit (panic.com/transmit). The GUI clients often have implementations of advanced features that are difficult in the old CLI ftp client.
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Tim KennedyJun 19 '12 at 2:42

I have transmit, but when I try to delete the folder or file i get an error. That is why I resulted to the command line.
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user19993Jun 19 '12 at 2:46

Before you can remove the directory, you need to remove the file that's in it.

rm testing/name_of_the_symbolic_link
rmdir testing

If there are many files, you need to remove them all.

If you want the convenience of familiar command line or GUI file manipulation tools to manipulate files over FTP, you can mount the FTP directory as a filesystem. Some OSes have this feature integrated in their GUI (for example, Ubuntu does as far as I recall); I don't know about OSX. You can mount the FTP directory on the command line using CurlFtpFS.